New group challenges role of Israel lobby inside Labour Party as effort to undermine Corbyn continues

The speech by British Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn at last week’s annual party conference included an unequivocal declaration of solidarity with the Palestinians. “Let’s give real support to end the oppression of the Palestinian people,the 50-year occupation and illegal settlement expansion and move to a genuine two-state solution,” he told delegates as they rose to their feet in applause.

To outsiders, that doubtless appeared little more than a crowd pleasing moment, easily delivered by the head of a leftwing European party. But appearances can be deceptive.

In truth, Corbyn’s declaration of support for the Palestinian cause came as sections of his party’s establishment demonstrated once again that they are determined to subvert his leadership. And the issue they have selected as his Achilles’ heel relates directly to the debate about the Palestinians’ future.

Corbyn has been battling to stamp his authority on the party establishment since he was elected leader more than two years ago with a decisive majority of Labour activists’ votes. Despite his enormous popularity among the rank and file, he has been viewed as far too leftwing – and unelectable – by the vast majority of his own MPs, sitting alongside him in the British House of Commons.

Many are ideologically wedded to the reinvention of “New Labour” – stripped of all taints of socialism – that occurred under Tony Blair’s leadership. In the search for power, Blair adopted a largely neoliberal agenda, embracing many of the core assumptions of the rival Conservative party.

Labour MPs and members of its ruling body, the National Executive Committee, have sought various ways to oust Corbyn, including forcing him to undergo a second leadership election last year. There was even a failed attempt to keep him off the ballot paper.

But in practice the attacks made him stronger: hundreds of thousands of supporters flocked to join the party to ensure his re-election, making Labour the largest political party in western Europe.

The real nasty party?

Given that they failed to be rid of Corbyn, sections of the party establishment have concentrated instead on wounding him, in the hope that the injury will eventually prove fatal.

The accusation that has gained most traction, gleefully repeated by a British media openly hostile to the Labour leader, is that, under Corbyn’s watch, anti-semitism has spread like wildfire through the party. On this view, Corbyn’s support for Palestinian rights has unleashed a dormant Jew hatred from the dark recesses of the British left. And there is a further implication: that Corbyn has turned a blind eye because he too is covertly anti-semitic.

Last week Labour leaders, including John Cryer, the chair of the parliamentary party, piled on the warnings of spiralling anti-semitism.

The right-wing Daily Mail newspaper, whose proprietor Lord Rothermere was an early enthusiast of Hitler’s Germany, branded Labour under Corbyn “the real nasty party” for its supposed indulgence of anti-semitism. The rival Telegraph accused Corbyn of “behaving like an ostrich”.

The Guardian newspaper, meanwhile, which has led many of the attacks on Corbyn from the liberal-left flank and done most to bolster a consensus that the anti-semitism allegations are well-founded, helpfully offered a “timeline of anti-semitism” in its reports of the party conference.

‘Arabs out, Jews in’

The exploitation of anti-semitism by Labour party leaders to weaken Corbyn, and to try to silence his support for the Palestinian cause, is not so surprising to anyone who has studied the Labour movement’s history.

A large section of Corbyn’s parliamentary party are dedicated to the cause of defending Israel, at all costs. They belong to a group called Labour Friends of Israel, which regularly sends Labour MPs on indoctrination trips to Israel paid for by the Israeli government.

Labour Friends of Israel is part of a long, and extremely dishonorable, tradition in the party of uncritical support for Israel. It is genuinely shocking to discover that in 1944 – four years before Israel’s creation – Labour’s National Executive Committee and the annual conference recommended that the natives of Palestine, a large majority population, be ethnically cleansed to advance the goals of European Zionists colonising their land.

In the book Publish It Not, the late Christopher Mayhew, who once served as a Labour defence minister, quoted that resolution: “Palestine surely is a case, on human grounds and to promote a stable settlement, for a transfer of population. Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out, as the Jews move in.”

Israel’s founding fathers took the advice to heart in 1948, during the Nakba, or what Palestinians call their Catastrophe. Israel expelled some 750,000 Palestinians from the Jewish state created on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland.

Paeans to Judaisation

Afterwards, British Labour party officials celebrated, with dewy-eyed paeans to the “egalitarian” kibbutz farming collectives spreading across newly “Judaised” land. Labour leaders sent their children to toil on these socialist kibbutzim – communes that adhered to an ideology of Hebrew labour, intended to starve the surviving Palestinian population of economic opportunities in the new state.

In 1967, when Israel occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, most in the UK’s Labour party, including prime minister Harold Wilson, averted their gaze. The government kept quiet about the abuses of the military regime imposed on Palestinians under occupation, as well as Israel’s recruitment of fanatical Jewish settlers to drive Palestinians off the remnants of their homeland.

In fact, Wilson, who himself served as president of Labour Friends of Israel, regularly rejected any suggestion that Israel withdraw from the occupied territories. In a speech in 1972, reported by the Jewish Chronicle, and again quoted by Mayhew, Wilson added for good measure: “Israel’s reaction is natural and proper in refusing to accept the Palestinians as a nation.”

In other words, for many decades the British Labour party was a hotbed of Nakba-denial and profound anti-Arab racism, used to justify ethnic cleansing, racial segregation and brutal military occupation.

A zealous lobby

Sadly, this is not ancient history. Many in the Labour party establishment appear not yet to have entirely cast off such prejudices.

The flame of zealous support for Israel was kept burning by a lobby group, Poale Zion, that was formally incorporated into the Labour party in 1920, shortly after the Balfour Declaration committed the British government to creating a “national home” for Jews in Palestine.

Poale Zion was the sister organisation of Israel’s own Labour party, which ran the country uninterrupted until the late 1970s. Israel’s Labour Party was responsible for carrying out the mass ethnic cleansing of 1948 and launched the settlement drive after 1967.

If there were any doubts about the collusion between the Israeli government and the JLM, they were put to rest by an in-depth undercover investigation by Al Jazeera earlier this year, called The Lobby. It found that the JLM was working hand in glove with the Israeli embassy in London to subvert Corbyn’s leadership over his support for the Palestinians. It did so by confecting allegations of anti-semitism against Corbyn supporters.

Shock over award

The exposure of these activities, one might assume, should have discredited the JLM and required at the very least that the Labour party formally disciplined the group’s leadership. But quite the reverse has happened.

At the Labour conference last week, the party gave the JLM the Del Singh award in recognition of its work “engaging and mobilising the Jewish community in support of Labour campaigns”.

Perhaps understandably, the family of Singh, a human rights activist who was killed in Afghanistan in 2014, were appalled at the JLM receiving an award named in his honour. They expressed their “shock and disbelief” that the award had been given to a group that “tirelessly defended the human rights abuses of the Israeli occupation, which Del spoke so passionately against, … [and] defended the illegal blockade against Gaza and the consecutive wars against the trapped population which Del categorically believed to be nothing short of collective punishment and war crimes.”

Another illustration of the monumentally blinkered approach to the JLM by many in the party was provided by Owen Jones, a prominent media commentator and hugely popular activist on the party’s left.

Shortly after the Al Jazeera expose was broadcast, Jones agreed to give a memorial lecture to the JLM, as if the underhand efforts by the group on behalf of a foreign government to undermine the elected leader of the party were of no account. The topic of the lecture was, of course, anti-semitism on the left.

In justifying his decision, after he came under fierce criticism, Jones admitted that he was a close friend of the family of the late Henry Smith, one of JLM’s leaders and the man in whose memory the lecture is named.

Comparisons with apartheid

Corbyn’s leadership raised hopes for the first time among ordinary party members that they might be able to supplant Labour’s Zionist orthodoxy with support for the Palestinian cause. Given the failure of western governments to pressure Israel to end the occupation, many activists are keen for the party to assert a more progressive stance, emphasising Palestinian oppression.

Some support grassroots initiatives – including Israel Apartheid Week, and BDS, the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement – premised on the idea that there is a clear similarity between Israel and apartheid South Africa. The Israeli government has effectively declared war on both initiatives, as has the JLM.

The JLM’s task has been to discredit pro-Palestinian voices inside Labour and isolate Corbyn so that there is no challenge to the party’s traditional Zionist stance. The JLM, quietly supported by the Israeli embassy, has recruited the media, crudely sowing concerns that there has been an explosion of anti-semitism under Corbyn’s leadership.

This has forced the Labour leader on to the back foot on the Palestinian issue. It had also made it risky for him to defend any of those accused, in case he himself becomes the focus of yet more dirty tricks from within his own party.

Trouble at Oxford University

The first blow was struck early last year at the elite Oxford University, where many Labour party leaders have been educated. The decision by one student, Alex Chalmers, to quit the Labour club, claiming he had been made uncomfortable by anti-semitic comments, made headlines. He argued, without providing any substantive evidence, that many Labour activists “have some sort of problem with Jews.”

Almost a year later, and largely unnoticed, a Labour inquiry cleared fellow students of Chalmer’s anti-semitism accusations. But Labour peer Baroness Royall was among those dissatisfied with the outcome. She said: “I am deeply disappointed by the outcome and fear it will further harm relations between the Jewish community and our party by confirming a widely held view that we do not take anti-semitism seriously.”

Contrary to his portrayal in the media, Chalmers was far from a disinterested observer of Labour party politics. An investigation by the Electronic Intifada discovered that he had previously worked for BICOM, the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre, another wing of Britain’s Israel lobby.

None of that slowed the spread of accusations by the JLM and Labour Friends of Israel of rampant anti-semitism in Labour’s ranks. Two things were overlooked in the furor, however. Despite a concerted effort by the Israel lobby to sniff out examples of supposed anti-semitism under Corbyn – usually by trawling through activists’ social media accounts, often highlighting posts published years earlier – only a tiny number of examples were actually supplied. And of those two dozen or so cases, few withstood scrutiny. In fact, many of the targets of what rapidly turned into an anti-semitism witch hunt were themselves Jewish.

African ‘holocaust’

A striking example was Jackie Walker, who is Jewish and black, and was the vice-chair of the Corbyn-supporting Momentum organisation. She was suspended, reinstated and then suspended again during 2016 over tendentious claims of anti-semitism, and removed from her role at Momentum.

Her second suspension occurred after a JLM official secretly taped her at a private “anti-semitism training” workshop run by the JLM at last year’s party conference. She and others who attended argued that the definitions promoted by the JLM intentionally conflated anti-semitism with criticism of Israel. She also suggested that Holocaust Day ought to be more inclusive in remembering other atrocities, such as the slave trade, which she has called an “African holocaust”. The recording was leaked to the Telegraph newspaper.

Paradoxically, as a result, Walker was bombarded on social media with anti-black racist taunts and accusations that she was not really Jewish. The JLM apparently did not consider her abuse anti-semitism.

But a far bigger and more useful scalp arrived soon afterwards in the form of Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London and a long-time political ally of Corbyn’s. Livingstone too had been outspoken among the senior levels of the party in supporting Palestinian rights.

The Nazi taboo

Livingstone got himself into deep trouble as he came to the defence of Naz Shah, one of Labour’s few Asian MPs, who had been targeted in the “anti-semitism purge”.

Defending her in a radio interview, Livingstone strayed on to a taboo topic. He referred to the documented fact that, years before the Holocaust, Nazi leaders and elements within the Zionist movement shared enough common ground to hold negotiations about transferring Jews to Palestine. His clumsy exposition in a brief and hostile radio exchange provided enough ammunition for JLM and others to seize on this as proof of Livingstone’s anti-semitism.

Shah, meanwhile, was reinstated as a Labour MP after publicly repenting. Following a dialogue with British Jewish leaders, she appeared to have found a new set of political priorities that accorded with the JLM’s. She described Israel as a democracy, disowned the BDS movement, and told the audience at one synagogue: “I absolutely agree that Israel has a right to defend itself.” From whom was unclear.

After a grilling by the JLM for two hours, to check her break with the past was complete, the movement’s Alex Sobel – now a Labour MP – pronounced that they were satisfied “of her support of Israel”.

Anti-semitism training

Anti-semitism has proved a trump card for the Jewish Labour Movement. Not only has it been used to intimidate allies of Corbyn who support the rights of Palestinians, but it has allowed the JLM to introduce “anti-semitism awareness training” to the party, effectively giving it licence to determine what constitutes hatred of Jews. For obvious self-serving reasons, the JLM has been only too keen to conflate anti-Zionism, as well as trenchant criticism of Israel, with anti-semitism.

At last week’s party conference, when Labour members wanted to celebrate Corbyn’s success in turning around the June election from a predicted rout to a near-victory, the headlines were again dominated by the “anti-semitism crisis” narrative.

This was not unrelated to the fact that for the first time the JLM is being challenged as the sole representative of Jewish opinion in the Labour party.

A new group was established at the conference called Jewish Voice for Labour, which attracted much support from activists. It seeks to provide an umbrella for those Jews in the party who feel they have been stripped of a voice by the JLM, including anti-Zionists and those who support BDS.

Much is at stake: the JLM has cultivated for itself a position as the exclusive arbiter of anti-semitism in Labour. And it has been able to do so, based on the idea that it is the party’s Jewish membership. Now that is under threat.

Membership rules change

The struggle was exemplified in the JLM’s efforts at last week’s conference to insert a new anti-semitism clause into the membership rulebook that looked suspiciously as though it was designed to make it easier to force out those outspoken in their support for Palestinians.

The JLM clause would have justified expulsion of any member who expressed an opinion which “the victim or anyone else think … was motivated by hostility or prejudice”. In other words, if the JLM inferred that another member’s actions or views were motivated by anti-semitism, however they defined it, that would provide sufficient grounds for their expulsion. The JLM hoped to designate itself as judge and jury.

The activists behind Jewish Voice for Labour, however, offered a counter-proposal, and battled against the JLM’s new wording. They had some success.

The National Executive Committee opted for a compromise, one that watered down the JLM’s Big Brother clause but still made a significant and dangerous concession. It stripped away the rulebook’s existing protections for speech and thought. Now members can be expelled if their “holding or expression of beliefs and opinions” is “inconsistent with the party’s aims and values, agreed codes of conduct, or [involves] prejudice towards any protected characteristic.”

In short, as some delegates from Jewish Voice for Labour noted, the NEC consented to the idea that “thought crimes” can be adjudicated. And while probably no one will search for vague indications that members have “prejudicial” thoughts about Muslims or gays, there is every reason to suspect that the JLM and others will be only too ready to accuse trenchant critics of Israel of harbouring secret anti-semitic views and motives.

Future foreign policy

Much more hangs on this seemingly esoteric debate about definitions than anti-semitism, we should remember. The goal among the JLM and the UK’s wider pro-Israel lobby is not to make anti-semitism unconscionable – it is that already in the Labour party. Rather, the aim is to circumscribe debates about Israel and how to solve its “conflict” with the Palestinians in ways that will undermine Corbyn’s efforts to put the Palestinians at the heart of his future foreign policy.

The JLM’s most significant ambition, as we shall see in the second instalment of this article, is to make the case that only pro-Israel Jews are in a position to know what anti-semitism is. And therefore, only they can be fair arbiters of what constitutes a just solution to the problems faced by Israelis and Palestinians.

About Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His new website is jonathan-cook.net.

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14 Responses

I think you are missing the subtext here. The Jewish establishment in England has a cozy relationship with the British government. Anti-Zionism pushed most Jews from Labor to Conservative so 3/4 are Tory. The remaining 1/4 float between Labor and Liberal-Democrat. In the Labor party there remain solid members of the Jewish establishment who are trusted by Jews.

There are Jews around Jeremy Corbin but they come from Jewish dissent. They aren’t part of the Jewish establishment and the relationship with their community is hostile not friendly. Ultimately what’s meant by Jackie Walker isn’t a Jew is that she is not an acceptable representative for the people she supposedly representing. The Jews of England do not believe that Jackie Walker et al have their best interests at heart. And they are making that clear in advance so there is no misunderstanding.

She’s seen the same way as the blacks in the militia movement are seen by the black community, as completely fringe and unrepresentative. African Americans don’t support extreme Libertarian and possibly neo-confederate politics. If one were to pick a leader militia oriented African American to represent them on an issue of importance to blacks their black skin color wouldn’t matter one bit. Insincere tokenism doesn’t work any better when leftists do it than when rightists do it.

What the JLM is trying to say is that if Prime Minster Corbyn happens and he doesn’t reform he is going to a have a very hostile relationship with England’s Jews. Not a hostile relationship with some internal lobby, but real honest to god ethnic tension as PM. Very similar to the “not my president” movement that faced Donald Trump. At that point antisemitism not going to be various statements from Movement figures its going to be the whole the UK government. And it is not going to be Labor Jews who have to hold back, it is going to be Tory Jews who don’t.

To even have a prayer of not facing open hostility towards his government he is going to need to bring in people from the Jewish establishment. Unlike Donald Trump his favorite daughter didn’t convert and marry one. It would be difficult for Jews to consider a leader with a position as hostile to Israel as Jeremy Corbin’s as legitimate. But you combine that with rhetorical insensitivity and a colonial attitude where he feels entitled to tell Jews who they consider community representatives and it ain’t even going to be a hard choice. He is going to be detested by Jews. JLM is trying to send a warning signal. Because they know how much fun the tories will have watching a Labor Prime Minister get slammed day after day after day by an articulate minority that hates the Labor Prime Minister. What Corbyn has been dealing with so far is the warning shot.

The stuff about antisemitic facebook posts is really a side issue. The side issue keeps getting talked about because no one is willing to have the honest conversation about lobbies and ethnic community representation. Don’t know British culture well enough to know how you have the conversation politely. But that’s the conversation that needs to happen if Corbyn doesn’t want to be taking fire for the rest of his career as party leader.

” The Jews of England do not believe that Jackie Walker et al have their best interests at heart. ”
What you mean is that the Zionist-supporters don’t believe …. There are so many others, like Jews for Justice for Palestine, like Jewish Voice for Labour (? have I got their name right) and so many, many, unaffiliated people who do believe that she and others speak for THEM.
It’s a bit of a travesty when JEWS are ejected/suspended from the party for ‘anti-semitic’ views.

No I meant what I said. There are Americans in Al-Qaeda. That fact doesn’t mean that America’s policy was not a war against Al Qaeda during the Bush and much of the Obama administration. I don’t have to qualify it by saying “anti Al Qaeda Americans”. America fought Al Qaeda. Similarly Vietnam, despite pro-Vietnamese positions within in the peace movement.

The position of the Jews of England are the positions taken by mainstream Jewish groups in England. Those are mainly Tory positions with Blairite Labor having some influence. It is reflected in the World Jewish Congress, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the European Jewish Congress, World Jewish Relief, Limmud…

and so many, many, unaffiliated people who do believe that she and others speak for THEM.

Where are these many Jewish unaffiliated people? What organizations do they control. Where is their headquarters? How many people are on the payroll of their organization? In other words what evidence do you have that they exist in meaningful numbers at all?

Check your Pew polls and Jewish sources. The vast majority of people who identify as Jewish are not affiliated with any organized Jewish temple, and have only the most superficial relationship with organized Judaism. Upwards of 75% by now.

“Affiliated Jews?” A couple million, in the entire world. And divided into at least three mutually irreconcilable denominations.

You might as well get practical, “Jeff b”; the greatest source of Jewish cohesiveness (when it exists) was prejudice and the ability to impose it from non-Jews. Try to see if you can’t get them to hold up their end of the deal again.

“It’s a bit of a travesty when JEWS are ejected/suspended from the party for ‘anti-semitic’ views.”

It is unfortunate, but it can’t be helped. As any Zionist will be glad to tell you, Judaism is suffering from an epidemic of “Jewish self-hatred” and “Jewish anti-Semitism”.
Only remorseless exposure and expulsion can save Judaism from this internal scourge.

The British “nobility” has been anything but noble. Historically, the self-proclaimed “noble” families have engaged in gang warfare over who gets to be the “royal” family. It’s all been about money, with savagery clothed in silk and fur.

It’s the same today, with most members of the “establishment” jockying for their positions in the financial structure. The alleged “ideals” of Britain are of no interest to them, except when the common people embrace them and need to be stamped down.

My thanks to Corbyn for his courage to stand up for true justice against all these false, slanderous “anti-Semite” accusations. And I’m very glad to hear people are flocking to his party.

The whine from Labour Friends of Israel and JLM of, “Anti-Semitic; it’s a ‘trope’, etc.” against anyone seeking reasoned answers to how it is that a large swathe of the Labour Party can apparently support the illegal occupation and blockade is familiar and was well-documented in the AJ series mentioned in Jonathan’s article. Those who watched the AJ documentaries carefully would have caught a near-hysterical Joan Ryan, M. P., adding her own piece of proprietary embroidery to the narrative she was retailing in a largely successful attempt to whip up indignation among anyone who would listen. The power of the pro-Israel lobby in the U. K. political establishment on both sides of the Houses of Parliament needs to be brought into open view before it can be effectively attacked and neutralised.
Similar, illegitimate power and influence on public or party policy wielded by Freemasonry or any other interest group (particularly one actively sub-vented by the government of a foreign power), if exposed, would be rightly excoriated. The pro-Israel lobby has protected itself from scrutiny and resulting opprobrium by exploiting the fear of false accusations of anti-Semitism. It’s difficult to foresee how this noose of fear can be loosened.
The article and @JeffB’s comment refer to Jackie Walker, M. P. Ms. Walker embodies white, European Zionists’ nightmare, of course: she’s animate proof and a much-needed reminder that being a Jew has damn all to do with someone’s race but is determined by their religious heritage or belief; and that being Jewish doesn’t make someone a congenital Zionist! No candidate elected to public office, btw, should represent the interests of British Jews (all +/- 300,000 of them, Zionist and non-Zionist); they should represent the interests of their constituents, including Christians, Muslims, Jews, electors of other faiths and of none.
The hypocrisy of such as the Harmsworths in the MSM, jumping on the “Labour anti-Semitism” bandwagon as a stick with which to beat Corbyn/Momentum, should surprise no-one; sadly, this media coverage helps entrench a false narrative. I’m no Corbyn apologist but on the questions of Palestinian rights and of the wrongs wrought by Israel, I hope he’s able to maintain the considerable courage of his convictions in the face of JLM and the other illegitimate influences seeking to silence him over Palestine and axiomatically, therefore, over Israel.

against anyone seeking reasoned answers to how it is that a large swathe of the Labour Party can apparently support the illegal occupation and blockade

OK let’s prove you wrong. Here are reasoned answers

1) Lots of them support Israel expanding beyond the 1947 boundaries. They disagree with the UN and don’t think the Labor party should support it. But they know they are in a minority, so while they can’t overturn the policy they can undermine it.

2) Lots of them may agree with something like the Oslo framework but aren’t horrified by the idea that ethnic population migrations can occur as it happens all over the globe. They disagree that this is an area of deep concern.

3) Lots of them may agree with Oslo but think the hostility to Israel is excessive.

4) Lots of them may be foreign policy realists and think the UK should side with a solid potential ally and while not liking the expansion don’t think it should be allowed to create a hostile relationship.

etc…

And when you start adding all these reasons together you have lots of people who disagree with your position.

Similar, illegitimate power and influence on public or party policy wielded by Freemasonry or any other interest group

Sorry. I’m losing you. Normally the point of a democracy is to allow people to advance policy positions they agree with. What in your mind is a “legitimate power”?

she’s animate proof that being a Jew has damn all to do with someone’s race but is determined by their religious heritage

I seriously doubt she has a Jewish religious heritage. Sorry religions get to excommunicate. If Jews don’t think she’s really a Jew then she’s just a women who likes to call herself one. Seventh Day Adventists do lots of Jewish stuff and are inspired by Jewish ritual, that doesn’t make them Jewish. They at least are honest enough to admit that.

, I hope he is able to maintain the considerable courage of his convictions in the face of JLM and the other illegitimate influences seeking to silence him over Palestine and axiomatically, therefore, over Israel.

He might, but it would be costly. You had 47 Labour MPs break with Corbyn on Brexit. For the Tories if Corbyn were PM Israel is going to be a delightful issue on which to repeat those sorts of historic failures. 1/3 of Labor keeps voting against support the PM/FM foreign policy on many issues then what? He is pretty much in same position he is today, a gadfly representing a sizable minority. The future PM Corbyn can stand tough and not have a majority or compromise and bring in representation that can unify parliament and the country more broadly and have a majority.

Heck you guys all talk about activism. The same way activism works for you to pressure politicians it works against you when you are the ones in power.

You aren’t thinking like a realist, you are thinking like a liberal internationalist. Why would a UK realist care if Israel can run indefinitely? In 2017 it’s doing fine. If in 2187 you have to work with a different country because Israel no longer exists you work with them. As for making insane choices that may or may not be a good thing. Realists look at the world rather competitively. Israel making bad choices can create opportunities for the UK.

The goal of foreign policy realism is the opposite of taking dramatic steps towards a utopian future. The goal of foreign policy realism is to exploit opportunity while managing risk and cost. Think about the mindset of Bush-41 (a realist) vs. Bush-43 (an interventionist).

@Citizen
Like you I can`t wait for the second instalment. Hopefully it will highlight the role of some of the other Zionist a… lickers in the Labour Party such as John Mann:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRUTpypkV0I

Whenever I see this staged farce I keep thinking of the unhinged Mad Mel Phillips. I wonder if she and Mann are related. I can certainly picture Mad Mel and the repulsive Joan Ryan relaxing over a bottle of Efrat and congratulating themselves over the sterling (sic) work which they are doing for their country of first loyalty – hint not GB.

The good news is as with young American Jewry the younger members of society in the UK via the internet and social media are becoming progressively more aware of the sordid and yes ludicrous and outdated influence which Zionism/Israel has within both of the major parties here in the UK as well as the ongoing crimes of Israel against the native Palestinians. This is most apparent in the Corbyn led Labour Party which now has a serious chance of forming the next government. Thus the panic reaction amongst the JLM and the desperate conflation tactics.

Everytime he opens his mouth and spews out on any subject he recruits a shedload of younger generation voters to the really new New Labour.

All Jeremy has to do is to hold his nerve and stick to his guns on the Palestinian issue and the ludicrous “growing Anti – Semitism in the Labour Party ” conflation crap and time and the internet will do the rest.

The British people will no more fall for all this fake news about Jeremy Corbyn being antisemitic than they did for the fake news during last June’s parliamentary elections that labeled him an undeserving and hapless candidate. Brits, especially their youth, are so captivated by Corbyn’s domestic proposals that they’ll see this fake news for what it is – a desperate attempt by Britain’s Zionist lobby to prevent G.B. from going its own way vis-a-vis justice for Palestine. Even more ridiculous, mainstream media’s siding with the Lobby against Corbyn. Racing towards its irrelevancy, that’s what this represents. Meanwhile, the ascendancy of the Internet and the struggle to keep it open and free of censorship.

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